


no good deed

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 07:42:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16091114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Phil finally meets the Superior. Turns out, it's not for the first time.





	no good deed

Phil flexes his hand then releases it. He’s searching for a little slack in the ropes tying him to the chair, but it doesn’t look like they left him any. Dang.

If he had two hands this’d be easy. All of his cybernetic hands are capable of breaking the simple ropes, but as has been the case from the beginning, these people know what they’re doing. They don’t just know SHIELD, they know the _team_. He’s hoping it was just AIDA, her eyes—and Melinda’s, he reminds himself, there’s no telling how long she’s been … not herself—spying on them every second she was on base. But he’s got that itch he can’t reach, the one that tells him things are gonna get worse before they get better.

As if on cue, the door opens and, seeing who’s standing outside, Phil would fall out of his chair if he weren’t tied down.

“Wa- what is this?” he asks, catching himself. “Mr. Lawrence? Is that you?” The stumble’s all his fault. He’s not an undercover agent by trade, just necessity, and most of his cover identities are simple variations on his natural personality, but there’s a world of difference between social worker John Phillips’ confusion and Phil’s current white knuckled fear. It’s not exactly an easy change.

Lawrence smiles in a way that’s all wrong and all too familiar. Phil’s gut churns. He thinks this is that itch finally proving true.

“I’m afraid Mr. Lawrence isn’t here right now.” It’s phrased like an apology but it sounds like anything but.

“You’re the Superior,” Phil says. There’s no accusation in his voice. He’s too tired to dredge any up. “You’ve been helping Senator Nadir.”

Lawrence opens his arms, acknowledging the truth of it. “She’s so eager to purge this planet of anything even remotely alien—and she hated Christian, so…”

Phil flinches. That name. He’d thought— _hoped—_ but it looks like he was wrong.

Guilt creeps up his insides like stomach acid. He knew, when he made the decision to have Ward put through the TAHITI protocol, that it was a violation, one far deeper than any of his crimes warranted. But he balanced that with the hope that, with a second chance, Ward could finally be the better person he wanted so desperately to be.

But it looks like all Phil’s gamble has bought him is more pain.

Ward or Lawrence or whatever combination of the two he is now shrugs, careless. “She’s been useful.” He chuckles. “I wonder what her donors would say if they knew their money was going to Hydra.”

“Oh,” Phil says sadly.

Ward’s obviously in the middle of some sort of speech and not happy about being interrupted. But he’s too curious to keep going without knowing what that was about. “What does that mean?”

Phil manages a weak smile. “I’d been wondering how far this went-” he nods to all of Ward, taking him in- “if you really remembered everything. I was hoping not; I don’t remember much that TAHITI took from me but what I got back was … painful to reach. So I’m glad you didn’t have to go through that, I really am, but …” He sighs, that sad smile coming back. “If you’re Hydra, that means you don’t remember Kara. I always thought she made you better. Before, anyway.”

There’s a nasty cut on Phil’s thigh. If they hadn’t separated him from Simmons, she’d have spent most of their confinement fussing about it. Without her here to draw attention to it, Phil’s mostly managed to forget it’s even there. Efforts Ward completely undoes when he slaps his hands down on Phil’s knees.

“I remember Kara,” he says, his voice a growl. “I remember _everything_.” He pushes away so hard that for a second Phil sees stars.

When he catches his breath again, he says, “I’m sorry.” He means it. To remember everything they took from him—the memories themselves are bad enough, but the kind of torture he’d have had to go through…

“You will be,” Ward says. “But not yet. I’ve gotta check in on Simmons first. Don’t want her feeling neglected.” He’s gone before Phil can find the words to lure him into staying.

 

 

=====

 

 

Grant pauses in the hall, taking a moment just to breathe and recenter himself. The mention of Kara caught him off guard. Nearly two years after he lost her, he’s stopped feeling like he’s walking around with his guts hanging out. The wound’s healed like a bad break. The limb works fine and whole days go by without him even thinking about it, but then something hits it just right and-

He breathes deep.

“Have fun?” Markham asks.

Grant grins. His muscles relax and in the fraction of a second it takes to fix Markham with an easy smile, the tension’s rolled right off him. “Just getting started. How’s our other guest?”

“More comfortable than Coulson.”

Grant snorts a laugh. Coulson’s tied to a chair, arms wrenched behind him, ropes so tight he can only relax if he wants bruises crisscrossing his chest. But Coulson’s the asshole who gave Grant the be-TAHITI’d-or-die choice. Simmons, he’s got nothing against.

He heads down the hall, making a detour on his way to the elevator to look in on his two favorite prisoners. After all this time, neither is immediately recognizable as the people he found in a bar in Tbilisi and the sight of them makes him feel all warm and fuzzy inside, especially after Coulson poured salt in that particular wound.

“She say anything?” he asks, earning a flinch from the less damaged of his special projects. It’s quickly followed by a surge of rage, a blind sprint at the door. The impact echoes down the corridor. Grant chuckles and, mood sufficiently lightened, turns for the elevator.

“Nothing useful,” Markham says.

Grant throws him a questioning look.

“She thanked me for taking off the cuffs.”

Grant barks out a laugh. “Of course she did.” He punches the button to head up. Simmons is on a different floor from Coulson. Still technically in the dungeon, but she’s high enough to get a window.

Simmons is the only one from the old team he likes these days. She’s always been soft on him, had that crush on him in the old days and saved his life when he risked it on that suicide play while in SHIELD custody. And, most importantly, he wouldn’t be where he is now it it weren’t for her.

So he’s going easy on her. He’ll still probably send little pieces of her back to SHIELD in a box, but he’ll give her drugs to take the sting off.

Her room’s got a cot attached to the far wall, where it’s easy to see from the door. She’s curled up with her knees to her chest, far as she can get from the room’s one and only entrance.

She’s small, is his first thought. Small and scared. Last time he saw her, she was having a screaming argument with Weaver. This isn’t exactly the same woman.

Six months on an alien planet’ll do that to you though. That—and the after.

(From what Grant hears, Hydra’s big bad god followed her home wearing her boyfriend’s corpse. Must’ve been real fun for her.)

He comes in easy, lets her hear the sound of the key in the lock and the scrape of his shoes against the floor.

“Hey,” he says, lounging in the doorway.

Her reaction’s better than Coulson’s. He’s got decades of practice at this and kept his surprise locked down pretty well. Simmons? Not so much. She goes all wide eyed and pale, mouth slack. She’s speechless. It’s pretty great.

He could let her guess the way he did with Coulson, but he’s going easy here, so he says, “I’m baaaack,” in the most over-the-top way possible, jazz hands and all.

For a split second he thinks it’s got him a laugh, but then he sees the tears in her eyes when she turns away, covering her mouth to hold back the—shit—sobs.

“Hey,” he says again, more gently this time, coming into the room to sit on the cot—close enough to touch, not so close he’s invading her space. “It’s okay.”

It’s really _not_ , but if it’ll get her to stop he’ll tell her whatever lies she wants to hear.

She pulls herself together fast, goes all stiff-upper-lip on him like she’s facing the firing squad. “What have you done with Coulson?”

“Nothing.” He lets that sit half a second. “For now.”

She absorbs that slowly. She’s smart, so it doesn’t come as a surprise. “And what do you plan to do with me?”

He’s not gonna tell her what’s coming, for one. That’d just be mean.

“Well, first I wanted to thank you.” He brushes her hair behind her ear, the better to see her surprise. This whole returning from TAHITI thing is more fun than he expected. “Right now Coulson thinks that the Trent Lawrence programming you stuck me with broke. But the truth is, I knew from the start.”

He woke up in a fake hospital room with Simmons standing over him. He’d been in an accident, she said. She started asking him questions, said it was okay if he didn’t remember yet, they’d deal with that later.

So he lied. He let her think he had no memory at all—it seemed to be what she was looking for—and then Coulson came. His social worker, he said, there to set him up for a new start at life.

Yeah, right.

He went along with it for a few weeks, long enough to lull Coulson into complacency, then he started building all this under the radar. He took that ridiculous Superior name, picked up the pieces of Hydra when Simmons’ godly stalker tossed it aside, and has generally been making SHIELD suffer.

“Whatever you did to my head,” he says apologetically, “looks like you fucked it up.”

She’s always been an overachiever, never met a test she couldn’t pass, so he expects the barb to hit her hard.

It doesn’t even seem to land.

“I know,” she says.

He’s still got his hand in her hair and pulls away at that. “You knew?” he echoes.

She tips her head against the wall, those big doe eyes going all sad and forlorn. “I performed the procedure on Daisy’s father after you.”

He nods. He knows all about Daisy or Skye or whatever-name-she’s-using-now’s dad. He’s inclined to let the poor bastard live his life, considering they were almost in the same boat and all, but he’s got a plan L for hurting Skye that’ll mean dragging him into things.

“Didn’t you wonder how I could completely fail at the one but not the other? I was doing surgery on your _brain_ , Ward. If I’d messed it up, you would have died.”

He thinks back to the days after the surgery. _She’s_ the one who brought up memory loss. _She’s_ the one who suggested, ever so gently, that maybe he needed more time to remember anything at all. He never even considered it a possibility coming from innocent Jemma Simmons but she was playing him, manipulating him into giving the answers she wanted. 

He gapes at her. “You did it on purpose.”

She nods. “I couldn’t make you disappear. No matter what Coulson said.”

Damn. Grant’s almost impressed.

“Why?” he asks. He knows why. He can see it written plain as day on her face, same as it’s always been ever since he caught her out of the air and called her brave. But he needs to hear her say it.

She sighs, a little wistful. “Because, even after everything you’ve done to us, I can’t seem to stop loving you.”

“Oh, Simmons,” he says. He twists on the cot, reaches out to pull her to him. She comes willingly, no hesitation at all. She’s so far gone on him she doesn’t even consider pushing him off. Not for pride, not for safety, not even for shame.

He’s already rethinking plans. No more little pieces in boxes. Simmons is gonna stay whole and healthy, the better to torment the team with exactly what he’s doing to her. Because as it turns out he can do a lot of things to her with her emphatic support. Like take off her shirt and leave a trail of bruises down her chest and lay her down on that narrow little cot and make her scream his name.

He can’t wait to tell Coulson all about it.

 


End file.
